BOOKS
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antibiotics. Endorsed by testimonials of questionable provenance and
aggressively marketed to a credulous clientele, they have come to exert,
in the opinion of many observers, a corrupting and demoralizing
influence on our high schools, colleges, universities, and professional
schools. That charge, increasingly documented in recent years , 'is one
that Jensen evidently prefers to ignore.
DAVID LAYZER
CRITIC, CRITIC
ALLEGORIES OF READING: FIGURAL LANGUAGE IN ROUSSEAU,
NIETZSCHE, P.ILKE, AND PROUST.
By
Paul de Man.
Yale University
Press. $19,50,
Paul de Man is the academic critic's academic critic. He
both commands all of the techniques of traditional criticism and
quickl y assimilates to his critical practice the newest critical fashions.
He ranges over three national literatures and is as comfortable working
in the eighteenth century as he is in the late twentieth century. He has
an especial interest in Romanticism and in its demise which, in this
book, he dates from Nietzsche's assault on it. His favored genre is the
essay, rather than the full-scale handling of a writer, tradition, or
oeuvre
which the academic critic typicall y prefers.
A llegories of Read–
ing
is his second collection of essays
(B
lindness and Insight
was his
first); and in it he picks up and further develops themes and interests
consistent with the critical convention known as "deconstruction"
which, along with his colleagues at Yale University, he currently
practices.
Deconstruction
is an English rendering of a French term which is
in turn a rendering of the German
Abbau,
literally, "unbuilding," a
prominently featured concept of Heideggerian philosophy.
It
suggests
a dismantling of a text such that its component parts can be identified
and the relations among them be clearly seen, but in a nonreductive
manner. The text is treated as a structure, the building of which is
conceived to have occurred in such a way as to have hidden the
necessarily arbitrary gestures of its' inauguration. The deconstructive
